Gingerbread Mansion

Today we skipped school....shhhh...
Instead we built a gingerbread house mansion!!
Kevin found the pattern on the internet and while I mixed up the gingerbread dough and cut out the pattern pieces, he and Wichita went to the store for all the sugary goodies we needed.  We let the pieces harden for 24 hours.  Monday night we mixed up the "glue", aka frosting, and assembled the roof and side pieces.  After letting these harden overnight we were able to finish the assembly today and do the decorating.  While it was really complicated and there were times I was sure it wasn't going to work, it actually turned out better than I expected and was easier than I anticipated!!  So here is the finished project (sorry no "in process" pictures - I was completely covered in stickiness throughout this process!)

we used fat pretzels to hold up the porch roof

we used twizzlers for the "tin" roof of the tower and covered the top with icing for snow

chocolate sugar wafers worked great for shingles on the main roof with icing for snow over the flat area and decorated with gum drops  - we were quite liberal with the icing so we had lots and lots of snow on the roof

licorice path from the side porch

and a path from the main door made of dinner mints

Wyatt's gumdrop snowman with a gumdrop hat and tooth pick arms :)

the completed mansion!!!!

oh and our lampstands made of candy canes with a yellow gumdrop on top - the base is a large marshmallow covered in icing for the snowbank

We had lots of fun working on this project as a family!  Plus it beat a normal day of school hands down! 
We are going to enter it in the gingerbread contest on Saturday.